Stream Capture: Returning Control of Digital Music to the Users

摘要

With Internet radio stations like Pandora, online jukeboxes such as Spotify and Grooveshark, and locker services from Amazon, Google, and Apple, each new streaming Internet music service joins a burgeoning and varied market. However, all streaming services and their respective business models, whether based on § 114 statutory licenses,81 industry negotiation,82 or DMCA safe harbors,83 rely upon a level of control over a user's music experience imposed by an artificial service layer. By introducing rivalry and excludability, this service layer relegates digital music - a medium that has traditionally been experienced as a product - to a private good under the control of remote service providers. Although the relegation of digital music to a private good provides excellent monetization opportunities for service providers in theory, this transformation may be vulnerable to the destabilizing nature of stream capture technology.